miércoles, 23 de mayo de 2018

Miguel de Cervantes led a busy life. He lived in Spain and
Italy, moving frequently, and was kept captive in Algiers during 5 years. He
also fought in several battles, and in the Battle
of Lepanto he lost the use of his left arm and
was nicknamed "The Cripple of Lepanto". Cervantes also wrote during most of his adult
life, and his greatest work is El Quixote, the adventure novel about the crazy
Spanish knight. However, Cervantes also
wrote many other stories, poems and even plays.

Cervantes married Catalina de Salazar y
Palacios in 1584, and the couple remained married until Cervantes's death.
Though they never had any children, Cervantes had an affair with actress Ana
Franca de Rojas, with whom he had a daughter, Isabel de Saavedra in 1584.

Lope was a poet, a sailor on the
Spanish Armada (using poems to a faithless lover to clean his gun) and an
Inquisitor; he had long-lasting affairs with two actresses, married twice and
became a father at least six times. He was secretary to two dukes, killed a
man, served a prison sentence, lived in the country and in the town, was an
avid gardener and was exiled from Madrid for fouling his ex-lover's name. He
became a priest, lived bigamously with two women in two homes, was widowed and
brought up four children by different mothers on his own. And he wrote plays -
as many, it is believed, as 800. He showed no interest in publishing them until
he had to in order to stop a stream of corrupt versions springing up, by which
time he had written 132. They played for a week and were dumped, and his
fanatical audience were kept engaged for 60 years.